Join the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) for the fifth annual Women Filmmakers Festival. Celebrate Women’s History Month this March with free, online screenings and virtual conversations with filmmakers Alison O’Daniel and Vivienne Dick and the museum’s time-based media curator Saisha Grayson.
Festival registrants will receive an email providing special access to watch featured films through March 14. Register here.
This programming is a prelude to SAAM’s exhibition Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, opening June 16. It will highlight how film and video artists employ the strategies of musical creation as well as its styles, structures, and lyrics in their work.
Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival
Wednesday, March 1, 5:30pm (ET)
Artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel is known for a film practice that is also an experimental deep dive into sound, music, and communication systems from a Deaf/hard-of-hearing perspective. The live program discussion will be sparked by excerpts from O’Daniel’s features: The Tuba Thieves (2023), which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and Night Sky (2011), a fantastical road trip movie that revolves around a hula-hooped shaped portal in the desert.
Wednesday, March 8, 5:30pm (ET)
Filmmaker Vivienne Dick captured the birth of the No Wave scene of the 1970s and ’80s by focusing on magnetic women rockers from New York’s gritty downtown scene. Her films made since then continue the powerful assertion that another way of seeing and living in the world is possible and necessary. The live program discussion will look at Dick’s wide-ranging career, starting with her earliest films from the 1970s through her recent documentary, New York Our Time (2020).
For more information and to register, visit americanart.si.edu.
